Chapter 166: A Gift You Already Possess

Every so often a story appears about the heady times as lived by my generation of boomer journalists– sometimes by one of us, sometimes by someone younger who had heard the stories of what happened long, long ago.

And what fun those journalists had. They were young and bold. They made their own rules. They reimagined what the craft could be. They dared. They risked. Then, inevitably, they moved on to other things.

I came across such a story the other day in Air Mail, a story about the wonderful and all too brief run of New Times, a magazine of the 1970s. It is a familiar story, one that brings to mind (forgive me the paleozoic era movie reference) Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney saying, hey let’s put on a show.

To wit: a group of young writers of some reputation and means band together and create a hot house populated by other young journalists who will one day go on to big things. Which generally coincides with the money running dry and the venture closing shop.

I am a sucker for these stories. Not that I ever worked at one. I worked at newspapers, covering the suburbs, all the while dreaming of making it to New York or the Bay Area and finding my place among these cool literati whose work I wished I could do, too.

By the time I arrived the party was over. And, as I have written in previous chapters, the promise of what journalism could be in the 1960s and 70s had slid into its own kind of conventionality – adapting the forms of experimentation but less and less the soul.

Things stayed that way for decades. Then, in the early 2000s, came the Great Digital Disruption which very quickly upended so many institutions, careers, lives and beliefs. Much of what was caught in the churn did not survive, and the cost was great and lasting. But even as so much died, or changed, new ways of thinking and doing the work emerged, unencumbered by what was regarded as sacred only a year or two before.

The Great Disruption created opportunities that often came at a price. New ventures that seemed destined to flourish vanished almost as quickly as they appeared. Legacy institutions resisted change and then embraced it with the knowledge that what they were attempting was akin to reversing the course of an ocean liner in a bathtub.

Even if I missed the party of the New Times era, I was still a beneficiary of the old, analogue order. This meant steady work writing for magazines and like many of my friends and colleagues a career as a proverbial midlist author: decent advances, modest sales, and the promise of a new contract by the time my book was appearing on the throw-away tables outside of Zabars on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

I assumed it would go on like that forever. I assumed incorrectly. I learned this the hard way, with a conversation with my former agent that ended with his telling me that he could not sell my new book proposal, that the world of publishing as we knew it when we were young was gone, and that if I did not come up with an idea that was sure to sell big I was, in his words, “toast.”

Painful lessons can be among the most useful, and while that one stung it forced me to confront where I found myself professionally as I was turning 60: on the outside, looking in. Not as it was decades earlier, hoping to get invited to the New Times party. But rather on the wrong side of a glass wall through which all I could see was fog. That is not q uite accurate. Mostly fog that obscured a beacon of light.

Forgive the overwrought metaphor, but the longer I looked at that light the brighter it blinked, so much so that it took little time for a message to appear, as if in neon: You don’t have to ask permission anymore.

Meaning: I could write what I wanted and was not dependent on someone to put in on paper. Needless to say, many people younger than me already knew this. I was playing catch up with my students and their contemporaries.

I kept writing but found myself ever more drawn to a new path: being a publisher. Together with my friend and colleague Mike Hoyt, the longtime editor of Columbia Journalism Review, we came up with an idea for our own, digital age version of what places like New Times were doing when we were starting out: we would launch a publishing venture where we would publish original works of narrative nonfiction, no matter the length or subject. I took the same, year-long business class for journalists that Mike had taken earlier. Suffice it to say, I was reminded with each presentation that I stumbled through just how little I and most journalists understood – or had ever bothered to learn – about how money gets made in our profession. (A shout out to my teachers, Doug Smith and Karen Gordon; I carry the scars proudly.) Of the many lessons I learned perhaps the most important was the one most akin to writing: what is this business/story about? Why does anyone need what I am selling?

It was not enough to say we had good stories. Lots of places had good stories, and people had been reading them at these places for a long time. What could we offer that no one else did, and how might that benefit our prospective readers/customers? As it happened, just as we were sorting this out, new publishing ventures were appearing, each with their own approach that, in those heady times, appealed to investors: The Atavist, Byliner, Narratively, among them.

Who needed us?

So it was that in the awful moments after a particularly ill-fated presentation in my class, when my plan felt woefully unformed and unfocused, I opened my laptop and, for reasons that I still do not understand, searched for “to make writers happy.” In Latin: ad scriptorus beatus.

I reasoned that if we could make writers happy – and not by hosting keggers and happy hours but happy professionally – they would produce their best work, unencumbered by the fear of rejection, humiliation, and the kinds of overly harsh edits that lead to a career change to the law. Happy writers would produce work that would make readers happy. So happy that, wait for it, the readers would contribute to that writer.

There was something more: we believed that if we could harness the collective power of a community of writers, if we could get writers to share the work of their fellow writers, we could build a network. I spent a lot of time researching networks.

We called our venture The Big Roundtable. We launched a Kickstarter campaign. We asked for $5000. We got $20,000. We hired a former student of ours, Anna Hiatt, as managing editor – she’s now executive editor of Covering Climate Now - , and another editor whom I had worked for years ago in Chicago, Cissi Falligant, who is still with us and who we’d be lost without. We incorporated. We hired a lawyer to draft our author contract. I paid another former student to design a simple Wordpress site. And just like that in the spring of 2012 we were in business.

I am telling you this story because we live and work at a time when there are more ways to do journalism than ever before and fewer ways to get paid to do it. Which, depending on how you see yourself and the world, means either existential despair or opportunity. I prefer to see the latter and I say that as someone who appreciates what it feels like to be kicked in the teeth when you’re told your future is not what you believed it would be.

So for those who are similarly inclined: you can do this. You can do this tomorrow. Heaven knows if we can, you can. You are more digitally astute than we were. You are more plugged into the moment and what is new and exciting.

You do not have to ask anyone’s permission. And unlike your predecessors at places like New Times of fifty years ago, you do not need a lot of money. (For the record: everyone who has ever worked or written for us has been paid; unpaid internships are a crime).

I would like to help, and the best way I can is to tell you the story of what we learned, and all the many mistakes we made. Perhaps you can find answers that eluded us.

The Big Roundtable was, in the parlance of the startup world, acquired. In a manner of speaking. In 2019, seven years after we launched we were brought under the umbrella of the Columbia Journalism School where, once we dissolved the LCC under which we operated, we became the Delacorte Review, the school’s literary nonfiction publication. We continue publishing narrative nonfiction, and I hope, continue making writers happy. I also continue making mistakes.

I am happy to share those with you as part of a story I’ll be telling from time to time in the months ahead. On my bookshelf is a stack of Moleskin notebooks (my only indulgence, I swear) in which I chronicled every meeting, event, story, and misstep. To say I was naive in certain ways is an understatement of Biblical proportions. I’m delighted to share the how and why, beginning with the premise of our name.

Like any good story it has more than its share of pitfalls. Why else would anyone read?

So yes, a gift. Call it encouragement. It cannot be returned or exchanged. Use it however you like. But know you can when the moment feels right.

We’ll be starting our annual Winter Break with this chapter. We’ll be back on January 24th.

Until then, a safe, happy and, yes, restful holiday season.

See you in 2025.

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If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.

It is seldom, if ever, the case that one student’s problem or question is their’s alone.

Please indicate if you want to remain anonymous, have your name or just first name included. I will include the question and then answer it as best I can.

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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture